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I’m on a course of children’s literature lately, and have just finished Kate Douglas Wiggin’s celebrated Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Also New Chronicles of Rebecca, which tells additional stories within the timeframe of the original.

There I am, reading along, enjoying the new insights that emerge when you reread a childhood favourite… when it hits me: this all sounds familiar. Very familiar. To wit:

The February 2010 installment of my Deconstruction Zone column for Pop Matters (Orson Welles: A Man of a Certain Ego) focused on the mammoth career accomplishments of a true American auteur, a certified genius who attempted to replicate some of the world’s great literary masterpieces on film, radio, and the stage.

To finance his ambitious book-to-film adaptations – many of which, sadly, never materialized, such as planned productions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (beaten to the punch by John Huston in 1956 who salved the wound by casting Welles as Father Mapple in one of the more dynamic scenes in the film) – the enfant terrible of Hollywood took quick cash for appearances in films helmed by other directors.